The Danish Girl review: Coyness no substitute for sense of self

Eddie Redmayne's winsome smile works much too hard in The Danish Girl. His Lili Elbe, one of the first people in the world to undergo gender reassignment surgery, is a very coy creation. The smile and the poses that go with it make femaleness seem like a set of mannerisms rather than a fundamental aspect of one's sense of self.

The film has been 15 years in the making. Lucinda Coxon began drafting the screenplay a few years after David Ebershoff​'s novel about Elbe came out in 2000 and a few directors have been tempted. Lasse Hallstrom would probably have kept the Redmayne smile even more busily employed but his fellow Swede, Tomas Alfredson, who went on to do the superlative Le Carre adaptation, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, might have dug deeper. Tom Hooper, who eventually stepped up, has made a film which delights the eye but doesn't really get to the heart of things. It's exquisitely designed, evoking the story's time and place with all the richness and precision that Hooper brought to pre-war Britain in The King's Speech. But Lili herself eludes him.

Trailer: The Dancer / La Danseuse

Trailer: The Danish Girl

Transgender artist Lili Elbe and talented wife Gerda Wegener lead a remarkable married life in 1920s Copenhagen.

In the 1920s, when she first begins to consider the surgery, the world knows Lili as Einar Wegener​, a successful Copenhagen landscape painter, happily married to Gerda (Alicia Vikander), a fellow artist who concentrates on portraits.

It's one of Gerda's portraits which helps to precipitate the emergence of Lili. Because her model is going to be late, Gerda asks her husband to put on the dress she is about to paint. She then suggests that they go to the artists' ball together with him in women's clothes and see how their bohemian friends react. For her, it is a game. For him, it's an apotheosis. Now that Lili has emerged, she will not be put aside. To Gerda's dismay, her beloved husband proceeds to disappear into the woman he has always wanted to be. The confident figure in the black suit, starched collar and Homburg becomes a demure woman who speaks of Einar as if he were a person she once knew.

Vikander extracts a performance of touching conviction out of this turmoil. Having played an android in Ex Machina and Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth, she's been rapidly demonstrating that she can do just about anything and her work here confirms it. She charts Gerda's progress from uncomprehending desperation and sorrow to a state of rueful resignation with both poignancy and poise. Einar has been both her lover and her comrade in art. She has already overcome pangs of jealousy over the fact that his work is more sought after than hers. Now, she deals with the realisation that he himself is lost to her before selflessly getting on with the business of helping him to make a life as Lili. Her only consolation lies in the fact that her portraits of him as a woman please the public much more than anything that she's ever done.

It's by no means a chamber piece. Hooper is intent on planting Lili and Gerda's story in its social context and he's at his best when bringing to life the avant garde circles they inhabit. Belgium's Matthias Schoenaerts, who's becoming a popular choice for roles demanding a quiet but commanding reliability, shows up as Einar's boyhood friend, who stands by him during his transformation. Amber Heard produces the right mix of humour and flamboyance as Gerda's confidante, Ulla Paulson, a ballet dancer who sometimes models for her, and Ben Whishaw plays a small but crucial part as Lili's first admirer. It's their flirtation at the artists' ball which alerts Gerda to the upheavals she's about to experience.

The problem is that Lili seems to drift above all this, so absorbed in her new self that she has no time or inclination to reflect on the feelings of those around her. Hooper has said that he and Redmayne were strongly influenced by Conundrum, Jan Morris' brilliant account of her own sexual reassignment surgery and the lead-up to it – "an anteroom of fulfilment", as she describes it. But the beauty of Morris' writing lies in the acuteness – and the comprehensiveness – of her perceptions. Certainly, she's fascinated by her own state of mind but this fascination doesn't obscure her interest in what her transformation means to the world at large. Humorous and analytical, the book is, above all, an appreciation, marvelling at the complexities of human sexuality. Sadly, Redmayne and Hooper don't get anywhere near that.